🚀 go-pugleaf

There has been a lot of talk about the "infectious" properties of the GPL.
Now, I'm not an Evil Software Hoarder, but I can think like one.  As I read
the GPL, there's nothing in it to bother an inventive hoarder.

Let's take the worst case first.  Suppose I want to sell my modifications
to GNU Emacs and prevent them from being given away.  Impossible, right?
Not to the inventive hoarder.  When you purchase a copy of PervertedEmacs,
you receive:

1.  An archive containing compiled, modified GNU Emacs code.  You are of
    course free to redistrubute this archive.  But it isn't executable,
    because the modifications are simply calls to external functions not
    included in this archive.  This is the whole of the GNU Emacs derivative
    work.  Nobody said it has to be executable.

2.  A written offer to send you the source code on tape.  The price is
    whatever nominal charge FSF is currently charging for their
    distribution tape.

Note that at this point I have complied with the GPL in every respect.

3.  You also get, on separate floppies or whatever, an archive containing
    binaries of my proprietary Emacs extensions which are called by the
    modifications in part 1.  I have to be careful writing these functions,
    of course, to be sure that they aren't derivative code--but hey, FSF is
    based on legitimate reverse engineering, right?

4.  You get a license to use the archive in part 3.  It's pretty
    restrictive: you can link it to anything you like and run the resulting
    executable on one machine; you can't copy it, distribute it,
    dissassemble it, etc.

5.  You get a linker, if you need one.

6.  You get an INSTALL program that if you choose to run it will perform
    the linkage and do other installation stuff.            

7.  And, of course, you get whatever documentation I want to send, etc.

The principle works for any software you produce using GNU.  *Give* the GNU
parts away, *charge* for a licence to use the parts you write, and have the
end user perform the linking.

I am interested in receiving informed opinions as to the legality of this
approach.
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Scott Renner 					USENET: pur-ee!uiucdcs!renner
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign      ARPA:   renner@cs.uiuc.edu